We will try to use Jack to make smooth combination of the audio sources. Jack was installed from the repositories. It's currently working however audio quality is horrible and now unusable. Some further investigation led me to the conclusion that Pulse-audio can also be used for this purpose. Since Pulse-audio is the default sound back-end for Ubuntu these days that option has proven to be easier to implement.

In Ubuntu 10.10 Pulse-audio is normally started on a per user basis when you log in to you gnome session. As we would like to run MPD even if nobody is logged in we also need to run Pulse-audio system-wide. This can easily be done by putting the following line in /etc/default/pulseaudio:

PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=1

Now we can start Pulse-audio system-wide:

sudo killall pulseaudio
sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio start

After this only users in the pulse-access group can use the audio device. So we need to add both our regular user and the user running MPD (default mpd) to this group. This can be done using the following command:

MPD or Music player Deamon. Installed from repositories. By default MPD is configured to run system wide and use Alsa as a sound back-end. Because we want to blend several audio streams together we cannot use Alsa but Pulse-audio. To make MPD use Pulse-audio the Alsa section in /etc/mpd.conf needs to be commented out and the Pulse-Audio section needs to be uncommented.

To allow the locally logged in user on the audio server easy control over the MPD daemon we installed mpd-sound-menu. This a small applet for the Gnome sound menu in the top menu bar. Installation instructions:

We will use djmount to make all UPNP shares on the local network available to MPD. Like most software djmount can be installed straight from the repositories. The next commands allow you to mount and umount all UPNP servers on your network.

A web interface to stream one's media library and control an MPD server.
The debian install package seems to have a bug so it is necessary to create an extra symlink before configuration can begin. This web interface is available at http://audio/ampache. Try it using user root and password ****** (the one we often use)

Ampache requires a MySQL database. It was installed from repositories with as root password the one we use too often. The ampache user in the MySQL db is ampache, the password is """"

A very simple and straight forward PHP application. Make sure Apache, PHP and the Apache PHP module are all installed properly. Download the tar file from this site http://www.renedegroot.nl/mpd.xml. Then all you have to do is untar it to your www directory and make sure user rights are set up properly. When you're in the space you can access it by simple visiting http://audio.

The Airwolf theme should be played on midnight Thursday and Friday. The file will come straight from YouTube, so we are not storing copyrighted information on our server. Play Airwolf from command line straight from YouTube ignoring video:

After Youtube did an update to their service the implementation explained above stopped working. A solution was found here: http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=89164. There are two possibilities explained. The approach using the compiled version of the .lua file failed on my configuration.